Battle of the Set-top Boxes

Ladies and gentlemen…

On the right, crushing the scales at 11 lbs., the current living room media player champ… The Rogers-branded Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 SD.

And the challenger…

On the left, floating like a butterfly at a mere 0.67 lbs… Western Digital’s WD TV HD.

Let’s get rrready to rrrummmbbble…!

My Rogers Explorer 8300 SD is no longer available, it seems. However, an upgraded HD version costs $499.99 CAD to buy outright or $24.95 CAD/month to rent. It also sports a fancy HDMI connector.

The 8300 HD encodes encrypted MPEG streams from your cable company, and adds the ability to record programs to an internal 80-160 GB hard drive. You can also schedule recordings via the on-screen TV guide. Furthermore, you can select, purchase and watch exclusive pay-per-view content (like recent DVD releases) without the tiniest whiff of air passing between your ass and the sofa.

Vimio – The Mobile TV App Your Carrier Doesn’t Want You to Know About

A recent episode of The Digital Production Buzz Podcast had the hosts positively gushing over US and A start-up MobiTV, who are offering wireless subscribers in the Americas live television on their mobiles through their carrier for a mere $9.95 USD/month.

The service isn’t yet available for me, but I can get Fido’s official 3G streaming video option for a slightly less reasonable $15/month — and only using one of their locked handsets, of course.

Or I can pay nothing and install Vimio, which is exactly what I did!

I first heard about Vimio from a fellow WordPress blogger. The company seems to be based in Ireland and possibly Sweden. Why is this important? Read on…

Nokia N96: What’s on the Big Screen

Today we set my Nokia N96 down on its porno kickstand and marvel at the video options for that huge 2.8-inch screen.

First up, the groundbreaking DVB-H live television tuner…

Oh, right… Just like Japan’s 1seg and South Korea’s DMB, Digital Video Broadcast isn’t available in Canada or the US and A. It has already launched in some Asian and European markets, though — hopefully when DVB finally makes its way here the carriers will see the value in keeping it a free service.

Yeah, probably not.

Next is a mobile version of BBC’s iPlayer…

Oops, almost forgot that the old media old guard thinks it can divide up the internet into different markets as has been done in the past. We have the same problem here, but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating…

Finally, something I can watch! The YouTube feed does a passable job of filling in for the sorely-missed emTube. You can’t save videos, though, only stream them.

And (big surprise) you can’t save those 20th Century Fox film trailers to your handset, either. But to give you an idea of the quality of these things you can check out this video of my first-ever S60 handset, courtesy of the directory’s official Nokia feed. Oh, and take note of the filetype and size while you’re at it, as the N96 will only play MPEG-4 video at 320 x 240 pixels.